On 11/10/2010 10:03 AM, William Adams wrote:
> On Nov 9, 2010, at 3:13 PM, Paul Stanley wrote:
>>> What I'd like to know is why LaTeX isn't used in place of html and css on the web.
> Interestingly, I asked that same question of Thomas Rokicki (author of dvips and NeXTstep's TeXView.app) at the recent TUG conference in San Francisco.
>> The bottom line is that Sir Tim Berners-Lee chose TextEdit.app's RTFview as the basis for his worldwideweb.app and that computers of that day simply couldn't swing the processing and storage requirements of composing TeX source on-the-fly
I think it was about more than just performance. A goal of HTML (as
with SGML) was to separate "content" from "presentation." (I used
quotes because every graphic designer knows that presentation *IS*
content, but that's another argument.) Both SGML and HTML tried to use
mark-up to delineate the structure of a document, while allowing the
presentation to be determined by the destination device and user.
(audio vs. text, etc.) Of course, HTML allowed quite a few impurities
in the form of presentation elements like <i> and <b>, but that's
another story.
LaTeX is more about document structure than plain TeX, but it's still
basically a programming language for formatting print documents, not
re-purpose-able content.
It's also true that the reason we have JavaScript and Flash and whatnot
is that this mythical separation of content and presentation is just
that ... mythical. The fact is that publishers want to control the way
their content is presented.
-pd
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Peter Davis
The Tech Curmudgeon - http://www.techcurmudgeon.com
Ideas Great and Dumb - http://www.ideasgreatanddumb.com